Ex-Justice Official: Hillary Employs 'George Costanza Defense'

Hillary Clinton has adopted the pathetic excuses used by George Costanza on "Seinfeld" to justify her use of a private email server as secretary of state," Shannen Coffin, a senior lawyer in the George W. Bush Justice Department and White House, writes in National Review.

"In one memorable episode, Costanza fulfills one of his fantasies with an after-hours romp with a cleaning woman at his office desk. Confronted by his boss after his paramour turns him in — George … insisted that the standards for workplace intimacy were not clear at the time of his indiscretion," Coffin writes.

"[Costanza says] 'Was that wrong? Should I have not done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here, that that sort of thing was frowned upon, you know'..."

Coffin says Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, did not "go full Costanza" in the beginning, at first insisting "she had faithfully complied with the law. In July 2015, she told CNN that ‘everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation,"’ Coffin says.

But her tune changed last week when the State Department inspector general rejected her legal analysis Taking a page from Costanza, Coffin writes, Clinton now "insists the governing rules were simply uncertain at the time. 'I thought it was allowed,' she insisted in her post-IG-report spin….

"At the end of the day, George Costanza’s approach to controversy did not work for George Costanza, who was fired on the spot. Hillary might want to look to more successful crisis-management professionals for advice."

Hillary Clinton has adopted the pathetic excuses used by George Costanza on "Seinfeld" to justify her use of a private email server as secretary of state," Shannen Coffin, a senior lawyer in the George W. Bush Justice Department and White House, writes in National Review.